Arabs take social media by storm
The use of social media continues to grow rapidly in the Arab world, resulting in the Arabic language being the fastest growing on different platforms, a new survey has revealed.
The fourth Arab Social Media Report, or ASMR, showed that there has been significant growth in the two most popular social media platforms — Facebook and Twitter.
Arabs using Facebook have hit 45.2 million at the end of June 2012, a 50 per cent growth in a year and triple that in the same month in 2010. Twitter, on the other hand, has over two million active users.About a quarter of Arab Facebook users are from Egypt. Another one-fourth comes from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which in turn combine to make up 80 per cent of the social networking giant’s users from the Gulf. Professional networking site LinkedIn — the first time it was surveyed in the ASMR — showed it has four million users from the Arab World.
“Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube continue to serve as primary avenues for over 12 per cent of the Arab population for raising awareness and disseminating information,” said DSG Governance and Innovation Programme director Fadi Salem, who is a co-author of the ASMR. “The increased use of [the] Arabic [language] suggests that social media in the Arab region has clearly outgrown the perception of being a platform for ‘the elite’.”
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